Design and fabrication of a novel concept-based autonomous controlled solar powered four-wheeled Floor Cleaning Robot for wet and dry surfaces

The modern domestic robot performs various tasks such as floor-cleaning, food serving, picking and placing of things like luggage and goods, etc., and this type of work is usually tedious, boring, and repetitive. Therefore, an intelligent robot is required, which can perform these types of tasks without any human intervention. In the field of cleaning robots, most of the researches have used the bump sensor-based vacuum cleaner system as a principle cleaning device. The vacuum-based cleaning robot can clean only dry dirt or dust, and another arrangement needs to be made for the wet cleaning process. Therefore, in this present work, we tried to design and fabricate the sensor-based autonomous controlled solar powered differential driven four-wheeled Floor Cleaning Robot (FCR), which performs wet and dry cleaning operations simultaneously. The double shaft DC geared motor with a cleaning brush has been attached to the front side of the chassis, and it works as a dry-cleaning unit. Similarly, the four DC geared motors attached with the scrubber have been fitted below the chassis of the FCR for the wet cleaning process. The sensor-actuator control system has been embedded in the microcontroller of the FCR to control the steering angle (direction) of the FCR autonomously by using the sensor data interpretation. The independent DC geared motors control the motion and orientation of the FCR. Subsequently, the kinematic and dynamic equations have been briefly described and presented. These equations help the differential driven four-wheeled FCR to avoid the obstacles during the cleaning process and provide stability during navigation. Further, experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed FCR in real environments.